Women in Comics Proposal

Women and comics, June 2, Amiens, France

Women in comics, authorships and representations

In the USA, facebook users who read comics are 53% female, a figure that has risen by 40% in three years’ time. Yet fewer than 30% of comics authors and characters are female, even if this figure is also on the rise (http://www.ozy.com/acumen/the-rise-of-the-woman-comic-buyer/63314). The female readership of comics is an expanding market which should ideally be balanced more evenly between genders – a fact of which American publishing companies are acutely aware.

Who are these female authors and what do they offer? Has their production evolved in time and how can these be compared with their masculine counterparts? How are women represented by male and female authors? Prospective participants are invited to try and answer these questions with several themes that we suggest.

– Graphic novel, women and minorities. Graphic novels tend to express interiority, trauma and unconscious, repressed thoughts. Thus it could be a relevant medium to make racial, cultural, social and sexual minorities visible, whether through the subject of these novels or their authorship. Can graphic novels allow more freedom to women, as opposed to mainstream, male-dominated comics? Such is Hillary L. Chute’s hypothesis in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010).

– Women as authors, the avant-garde movement and feminism. The avant-garde can be defined as a form of cultural minority, both aesthetically and politically. In the 1970s, very few female comics authors published mainstream productions, as Trina Robbins demonstrated. They were however to be found in the underground movement. The first number of It Ain’t me Babe: Women’s Liberation, edited by Trina Robbins in July 1970, was entirely created by women. Tits’n’Clits in 1972, co-edited by Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevely, was devoted to female sexuality. Wimmen’s Comix, published three weeks later, became a reference and was produced for two decades by a group of ten women, in turn influencing later periodicals, among which Twisted Sisters in 1976, which came as a reaction against what Aline Kominsky-Crumb perceived as an idealisation of women in Wimmen’s Comix. The first lesbian comic book, Come Out Comics, by Mary Wings, was published in 1973 and encouraged Howard Cruse to found his Gay Comics in 1980; both being explicit sources of inspiration for Alison Bechdel and her 1983 Dykes to Watch Out For.

– More generally, a diversity of subjects can be broached within this workshop: an open list of topics could include the evolving representations of the female body under male authors’ pens and conversely, of male and female bodies under female authors’ pens; the interactions between the history of female comics authors and the history of the USA; the female forerunners of our contemporary female authors; the evolution of the medium of comics according to its authorship; the evolution of readership(s); the appropriations and subversions of masculine canons. If the American area is of particular interest to this workshop, foreign or international comparisons may apply.